Emery N. Brown—statistician, computational neuroscientist, and anesthesiologist—was recently awarded an honorary Doctor of Medical Sciences degree from Yale University for his groundbreaking research on anesthesia and the brain.
Neuroscience
Erasing the Gap Between Statistics and Imaging: A Q&A with Marina Vannucci
SDSI, the ASA’s new open-access journal led by Marina Vannucci, is building a dedicated home for statistical imaging research and interdisciplinary collaboration, with early efforts focused on visibility and special issues.
New Member Spotlight: Matthew Trang
Meet new member Matthew Trang. From algebraic geometry to neuroscience, Matthew’s journey into statistics is as fascinating as the research he now leads.
Brown Awarded Nation’s Highest Scientific Honor
ASA member Emery N. Brown, Edward Hood Taplin Professor of Medical Engineering and Computational Neuroscience at the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT, was awarded the nation’s highest recognition for scientists and engineers, the National Medal of Science.
Daniela Witten Wins COPSS Presidents’ Award
Daniela Witten is a professor of statistics and biostatistics at the University of Washington and the Dorothy Gilford Endowed Chair in Mathematical Statistics. She develops statistical machine learning methods for high-dimensional data.
Ani Eloyan
Ani Eloyan’s favorite subject in school, while growing up in Armenia, was mathematics. It wasn’t until graduate school, however, that she pursued statistics and learned to model health data. While she focused on the methodology of matrix decompositions for her PhD thesis, she had the opportunity to learn about neuroscience and applying statistics when analyzing brain imaging data during a postdoctoral fellowship. Her career and life have given her some great first moments—seeing the pride on her grandfather’s face when she finished her PhD, watching her first PhD student defend her dissertation, and hearing her toddler say a complete sentence.
CHANCE Highlights: Issue Looks at Black History Month, Slot Machines, and Crowd Funding
The February issue of CHANCE includes an interview with Emery Brown, as well as articles on crowd-funding, slot machines, statistics education, and misattribution.
Emily B. Fox
Emily B. Fox began studying neuroscience, but was swayed by engineers at MIT to study electrical engineering—and was drawn to signal processing. Her interest in the topic was refined into a focus on statistical signal processing during a junior year abroad at Cambridge University. She is an associate professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering and department of statistics at the University of Washington and the Amazon Professor of Machine Learning.
Amanda F. Mejia
Amanda F. Mejia started with limited financial resources at her disposal, but pursued scholarship and fellowship opportunities and earned her master’s as an industrial engineer. She soon discovered she wanted to learn more advanced analytical techniques and work toward a positive societal impact, so she returned to graduate school. As a professor today, she strives to emphasize the “why” of statistics before the “how” and to bring research problems into the classroom.